• Wilco@lemm.ee
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    22 days ago

    Could you imagine a world where word of mouth became the norm again? Your friends would tell you about websites, and those sites would never show on search results because crawlers get stuck.

    • Zexks@lemmy.world
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      22 days ago

      No they wouldn’t. I’m guessing you’re not old enough to remember a time before search engines. The public web dies without crawling. Corporations will own it all you’ll never hear about anything other than amazon or Walmart dot com again.

      • Wilco@lemm.ee
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        22 days ago

        Nope. That isn’t how it worked. You joined message boards that had lists of web links. There were still search engines, but they were pretty localized. Google was also amazing when their slogan was “don’t be evil” and they meant it.

        • zanyllama52@infosec.pub
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          22 days ago

          I was there. People carried physical notepads with URLs, shared them on BBS’, or other forums. It was wild.

          • i_love_FFT@jlai.lu
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            22 days ago

            There was also “circle banners” of websites that would link to each others… And then off course “stumble upon”…